Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Would anyone choose to live in the apartment of someone who has just attempted suicide and is in a situation of life or death? I don’t think I would. Roman Polanski as Trelkovsky, a young student, would. The film has barely started and the viewer is already pushed into an awkward situation where he has to accept the moral disagreement of living in the house of someone who is dying. Can you even trust those living around? Can neighbours who have witnessed a suicide be trusted in their moralistic righteousness? Should they even be trusted when all of them speak perfect English, where even the French actors are doubled with a perfect accent? I would find that slightly disturbing if I arrived in such an apartment in Paris.

Trelkovsky is a quit type. I would even say a bit naïf, and fearful of disturbing his neighbour. In keeping with his apartment series, the neighbours are obviously of a weird type, though they are not as blatant in their attitude as in Rosemary’s Baby. Though odd, they do not strike as particularly atrocious or eerie. This time, we are led into the mind of the Tenant, constantly wondering whether or not they are truly his enemies. The use of a dark apartment creates an oppressive feel to the whole scene. As Variety Staff says, “There is an effective atmosphere and it does create a feeling of personal anguish.” (Variety Staff:1975)

The pitiful outside appearance of the protagonist doesn’t foreshadow the strength of his inner self. He creates his own bubble of resistance to what he is seeing outside. We are challenged in the way we must trust his vision. Though we are seeing through his eyes, we are confronted by the unnatural that surrounds his presence. Nothing proves the contrary, guiding us as the movie evolves more and more into his madness. We excuse his madness even to the point of understanding his transvestite attitude. Nick Schager from Slant Magazine describes the experience as an egocentric homage to the protagonist. “The film's nihilist point is clear: It's the world against Trelkovsky and not the other way around. There's an overwhelming sense here that the world is a stage and the people in Trelkovsky's immediate realm are in constant performance mode. Because everyone in the film seems to exist solely for his benefit, it's sometimes easy to brush Trelkovsky off as an egomaniacal loser.” (Shager:2003)

What must be understood in the end is that everyone accepts the world to be a set solely designed for them. Polanski portrays the experience through his own failure. Yet the success is not completely assured as Film 4 comment on there own review, “Frustratingly, because so much of the film is so odd, little is ever explained. But the macabre tone and eerie appearance (thanks to Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer Sven Nykvist) mark it out as an intriguing depiction of mental breakdown built round a dark comic performance by the director himself.” (Film4)

Time is scary. Yet after the terrible failure of my grand father clocks which now decaying in some unknown folder, I was left to wonder what to use to showcase this terrible curse that afflicts us all. I brained stormed some ideas, playing around with different concepts, and it is only now, as I am finishing my piece that I notice that the clock simply did not work. I changed my focus, looking at how the surroundings could portray an uneasy feeling of a complete lack of control over our decisions. I chose to depict a prison. I like the idea of a window with bars present to cast a shadow on the scene.

I worked on the walls as this permitted my to design the space for the windows. I decided on a table to give a support to the next object that would imply uncanny. A telephone hanging from the table, I hope, should imply quit a lot. Why is it hanging? The phone in my depicts the only connection to the outside world for the unknown convict. I played around with some designs for the phone, preferring a weird looking one to a more traditional one. I tried to convey the feeling that though the scene seems quit serene thanks to the sun light, the viewer is still stuck inside. I find working with light quit difficult, as it seemed that I kept changing the direction or the settings.

So here are some of my trials at playing with light, though I was doing it wrong. I kind of like the idea of an open roof, giving a fully lit interior. Number 2 portrays that the best. I will now work mainly from number 3, adding a mat painting through the windows. Number 5 shows the "Grand-Father Catastrophe"

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5

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I will scan all my drawings tomorrow as they are not in my possession right now.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

It is always hard to scare someone without any special effects. Stanley Kubrick in his film the Shining, brings out the sordid through the acting and the very minimal set. The cast is extremely limited, consisting of simply three main actors with other minor characters serving as a back drop to their madness.

The main cast is introduced to us quit gently at first. Their is nothing special to note about them, as they just seem to be a normal trio of a family. The film properly starts when the snow storm cuts off the three from the rest of the world. This is when everything goes down into nothing. Their is an ambiguity to the film that seeps through every of its aspects. The unnatural is fused with the real, leaving us wondering who is actually right. We are lacking a real observer into what is happening in the hotel. Each character revolves around himself, and lets that influence his perception of the other two. The lack of trust is further accentuated by the desperate feeling of uselessness shown by the subsidiary characters such as Dick Hallorann, the cook who shares the same psychic gifts as Danny, the son of Jack and Wendy. He feels something is wrong and decides to come back to see. It takes him a long time to get there, as we see him regularly making his way to the hard to reach hotel. Yet his influence on the characters is minimal as all the wait comes to naught when he is brutally murdered by Jack.

This confirms quit early in the film that we are left to believe one of the three protagonists. Two of them speak to themselves or to some imaginary character, while the third Wendy, seems lost in her own terrible imagination, that leads her to believe that Jack has always been insane, which may or may not be true, but once again we might not be sure. This constant unknown creates a dreadful feeling of unease, which is further accentuated by the incredible neutrality and minimality of the hotel. Its impressive size is countered by an interesting set of geometrical designs that seem to shrink the whole scene. The curious ambiguity is well shown when we are following Danny on his little tricycle, in a child's version of the opening sequence of "The Naked Gun".

Danny's madness is an interesting case, as it is a fantastical part of the film that doesn't come out as weird, such is the success of the reality of the movie. His weird habit of talking to his imaginary friend in a lower octave voice is surprisingly normal. AS Ebert says in his own excellent review: "Danny: Is he reliable? He has an imaginary friend named Tony, who speaks in a lower register of Danny's voice. In a brief conversation before the family is left alone, Hallorann warns Danny to stay clear of Room 237, where the violence took place, and he tells Danny they share the "shining," the psychic gift of reading minds and seeing the past and future. Danny tells Dick that Tony doesn't want him to discuss such things. Who is Tony? "A little boy who lives in my mouth." (Ebert: 2006)

Stephen King did not approve of this cinema version of his book. Yet, as James Berardinelli explains in his review, Kubrick's version is more real and in that sense creates a greater sense of dread and paranoia. "King would have us believe that the hotel is haunted. Kubrick is less definitive in the interpretations he offers." (Berardinelli: 2009)

Yet not everyone has seen the shining light in their eyes when they see this movie, as the Variety staff explains on their site, " With everything to work with, director Stanley Kubrick has teamed with jumpy Jack Nicholson to destroy all that was so terrifying about Stephen King's bestseller." (Variety Staff: 1979) This state of mind is representational of the general feel the public had for the film when it came out. Its legendary status nowadays shows the evolution.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Rosemary’s Baby, filmed in 1968 by Roman Polanski, is a masterful thriller, based around a Satanist cult terrifying a newly-married woman, though we are led to confusion through a pendulum of justified fear and paranoiac imagination. The ambiguity in the script creates a tensed and anxious atmosphere, turning a simple tale of a couple moving into a new apartment to a manic-depressive story of motherhood. The lack of a different point of view traps us into the consciousness of Rosemary forcing us to see everything the way she does. The ambiguity of the other characters plants the seed of doubt right from the beginning.

As Geoff Andrew states in his review on Time Out London, “ambiguity is constant”. The change between a scene of grounded reality and psychotic madness is cleverly orchestrated by Polanski, who through a gradual increase in psychosis fuses the two together. The resulting confusing blurs the film into a dreamlike episode of possibly naïve foolishness. The husband, at first, serves as an anchor to reality, seeing his wife’s plunge into madness with an intriguing serenity. His ambiguous role is further accentuated by the part played by the family friend Hutch. He seems more concerned by what is going on playing the role of detective character. He gives her a strange book on witchcraft which starts her whole paranoia, yet he dies before being able to explain himself. Through a series of event Rosemary uncovers the real personalities of the people she is involved with both romantically and neighbourly.

Roman Polanski was able to introduce fear and paranoia without any out of this world special effects. Mia Farrow, who plays Rosemary, is perfect in her demented mother role. Roman Polanski really succeeds in creating an anxious environment set in a still and quit normal setting. An unnamed author from the Times agrees that “in addition to being superb suspense is a wicked argument against planned parenthood.”

Roger Ebert compares the book to the film quit well, saying that “Although I haven't read Levin's novel, I'm informed that he works in the conventional suspense mode. We meet Rosemary and her husband and the couple next door. We identify with Rosemary during her pregnancy, sharing her doubts and fears, But when the ending comes, I'm told, it is an altogether unexpected surprise.

Polanski doesn't work this way. He gives the audience a great deal of information early in the story, and by the time the movie's halfway over we're pretty sure what's going on in that apartment next door. When the conclusion comes, it works not because it is a surprise but because it is horrifyingly inevitable. “